For anyone who has ever wanted an insider tour of a trendsetter’s home, Openhaus opens the door. The company was founded to help social media influencers, interior designers, and other content creators as they attempt to field questions from followers about their lives and homes, including favorite products, tips on good deals, and where to buy.
Carson Clement co-founded Openhaus after picking up a Matterport Pro2 camera as a hobbyist and seeing the possibilities in using digital twins to capture a home in beautiful 3D imagery, while showcasing the furnishings. Thus a new e-commerce business was launched, featuring shoppable home tour experiences.
Today, Openhaus hosts thousands of shoppable online room tours using Matterport digital twins. Fans can explore an influencer’s home in realistic 3D, save ideas and favorites, and even purchase items of interest.
Elevating Brands with Word-of-Mouth in 3D
Openhaus’ business model includes working with brands such as Tuft & Needle, Boutique Rugs, Minted, Etsy, and Magnolia to facilitate product placements in virtual 3D tours of influencer homes. In addition, the company is growing its consulting services business by helping brands, retailers, and media companies create content that lives on Openhaus.
“Brands spend a lot of money making their retail spaces beautiful, but those are limited by physical geography constraints. We can capitalize on those investments with gorgeous, immersive online shopping experiences in 3D. For companies that want consumers to spend more time engaging with their brands in a memorable way, Openhaus is an ideal solution,” says Clement.
Metrics that Openhaus generates from the models demonstrate engagement. “We see people are moving around on average 20 times inside each home, viewing more than eight products during each visit. If you compare that to how often people click on two-dimensional images or videos on a normal website, we see a very favorable lift,” Clement says.
The company has found that five to nine percent of an influencer’s audience will take a virtual tour of the influencer’s home when invited. The tours typically kick off with a short video featuring the influencer talking about their space and some of the things they love about it. “It’s very powerful when an influencer features a brand in their tour, perhaps mentions what they like about a particular product, and then links that experience with their blog, an Instagram story, TikTok, or a link in their bio,” says Clement.
Many visitors will go on to explore additional interesting virtual home tours from other personalities on Openhaus. Clement likens it to an online, 3D version of MTV Cribs. “We tested it with a number of designers and creators and the response was great. There's nothing quite like actually being able to experience someone's home by virtually walking around and engaging with it yourself, lingering along the way for a closer look at a vase on a shelf, if you’d like. It seemed like a great way for creators and designers to invite their audiences into their homes, rather than just showing fans more limited 2D pictures or videos,” says Clement.
Scaling Efficiencies with Matterport Capture Services On-Demand
In its earliest days, Clement and his colleagues scanned as many homes as they could themselves, using the Matterport Pro2 camera. With increasingly busy schedules and a backlog of new homes to onboard, Openhaus turned to Matterport Capture Services On-Demand. The service, available in major metro areas throughout the U.S., makes scheduling a professional digital twin capture a cinch via Matterport’s website.
“Matterport Capture Services On-Demand makes it really simple for us to help new creators develop and publish their home tour experiences. Our turnaround time for getting a scan has been under 48 hours, usually even less than 24 hours, which is amazing,” Clement says. “Matterport Capture Services On-Demand has helped reduce our capture costs by 60 to 70 percent, which has helped our profitability as a startup. The value is incredible.”
The Matterport Capture Technicians work with Openhaus to confirm 3D camera placement locations, which usually entail a greater number of placements for a scan than for a real estate home sale, in order to showcase all furnishings, decor, and accessories with the greatest detail. “We’ve been really pleased with how the capture technicians meet our needs for extra scan locations,” says Clement.
Clement praises the professionalism of the technicians. “We have a close relationship with the people joining Openhaus as content creators in our first year since we’re guiding them carefully along the whole onboarding process. It’s imperative that the technicians conduct themselves very professionally, because they’re going into these homes on our behalf. They have met our expectations very well,” Clement says.
Developing Immersive, Shoppable Experiences
Some of Openhaus’ designers and B2B partners already have Matterport digital twins and approached Openhaus to deliver a better experience for enhanced tours, including e-commerce options, along with promotion and sharing of the tours. Openhaus makes its magic happen with Matterport developer tools.
The Matterport APIs and SDK help Openhaus with its internal workflows, integrating Mattertags in the digital twins with the information in Openhaus’ database, to keep home tour and merchandise information up to date. Openhaus can customize tags with images and additional product information or integrate other content like videos.
“We rely on Matterport APIs linked to our database to keep product and inventory information in the digital twins current. Without the APIs, achieving that would be quite a headache—eventually impossible to update on the fly and at scale,” says Clement.
Currently, visitors exploring a home can hover over product tags to see an image, the product name, and sometimes prices. Someone interested in buying can click the shop button to be taken to the product page on a brand or retailer’s website.
Openhaus is working to offer the entire purchase experience natively within its virtual tours, making it seamless and fast for visitors to add items to their cart and complete a purchase without visiting external websites. The company will make inventory data available in real time within the product tags in the digital twins, using Matterport API integrations between Openhaus and e-commerce platforms like Shopify.
With a small boutique client, The Nested Fig, Openhaus tested embedding 3D virtual tours in the product web pages on the client’s Shopify-based website. “For product pages that included those 3D experiences, the average time users spent on the page increased by 65 seconds, which is huge for an e-commerce retailer,” says Clement.
Multiplying Benefits of Matterport Partnership
Clement chose to work with Matterport from Openhaus’ very beginnings because of the quality of its technology and leadership in the market. “Matterport is a leader in the space, clearly way ahead of the competition, making it a perfect company to partner with for developer tools,” says Clement.
As the company has grown, Clement appreciates the efficiencies enabled by his team’s access to Matterport developer technology.
Our time to get a new home tour experience created and open for shopping has decreased by 90% because of Matterport APIs and SDKs, and the tools we’ve built for our platform with those,” says Clement. “We can now cost-effectively and scalably onboard new clients.”
This translates into benefits for Openhaus’ clients. “Our big value proposition to busy designers, brands, and retailers is that we make it really easy to get started. Between Matterport’s developer tools and everything it’s doing to make capturing spaces faster and easier, we can create 3D content more quickly than ever before,” Clement says.
“Initially we focused on building a product that people love to use. We did that so well that our waitlist of creators and designers interested in joining Openhaus became hundreds of people long. Now we are hitting our stride,” he says.
With the company’s operations continuing to expand, Matterport for Mobile helps streamline the process further. Some of Openhaus’ creators have captured their homes on their own, using an Android phone or iPhone. “We’re pleased with the quality of Matterport for Mobile and how easy it makes it for anyone to capture their space at any time,” says Clement.
Interest is growing in scanning established home spaces with greater frequency, perhaps even monthly, to allow for seasonal changes including updated furnishings and decor. Clement anticipates a transition from a home-based model to more of a room-based approach, since it’s easier for creators to update a single room at a time.
Openhaus is working with some of its creators and brands on livestream shopping events inside of their 3D tours. “We are excited to be adding new dimensions to home-based shopping experiences that activate new relationships and reinforce loyalty for both consumer product brands and influencer personalities,” says Clement.
Openhaus is a Matterport Platform Partner that leverages Matterport APIs and SDKs to build and commercialize their apps and integrations with Matterport’s market-leading spatial data platform. As a Platform Partner, they gain access to a range of commercial benefits, such as Matterport’s distribution network and enhanced support as well as co-marketing and co-selling programs to help them successfully monetize their applications. To learn more about the Platform Partner Program and apply to join, visit https://matterport.com/platform-partner-program
ABOUT OPENHAUS
Openhaus makes it easy to create, customize, and share shoppable 3D experiences from a home or anywhere else, including integration of videos, livestream events, and e-commerce platforms. https://openhaus.app/
HEADQUARTERS
Virtual, United States
PRODUCTS
Matterport SDK; Matterport APIs; Matterport Capture Services On-Demand
Results
- Shortened time from home and furnishings capture to debut of shoppable 3D tours by 90% with Matterport APIs and SDK
- Cut capture costs by 60% to 70% with Matterport Capture Services On-Demand
- Attracting up to 9% of the invited influencer audiences to virtual tour experiences
- Generating views of eight products per visitor, on average
https://matterport.com/en-gb/industries/case-studies/openhaus-reduces-time-produce-shoppable-3d-experiences-90-matterport